ON MEASURING A LIFE, JUDGING WHAT WE have WROUGHT, AND SITTING WITH A DEATH
Wednesday January 29 2020
Dear Sarah,
I started making notes for this week's letter to you right after I read your letter last week. It was so full of things I wanted to respond to! It was a letter full of joy. (Anytime Simon wants to corral y'all together for a drive to Minneapolis to deliver a drawing he made will be good for me! I'm often at home!)
I read and reread your words from Lynda Barry: She said she once had an art teacher that changed her life with one simple sentence. Lynda Barry had been fretting over whether something she had drawn was good, and the teacher said, “That’s none of your business.” You said, Whatever we make and say and create is no longer ours once it is out in the world; it is ready to take new shapes and meanings in different contexts viewed by different people. At first, even though what Barry's teacher had said was exactly right in my mind, I still went through my usual thought process, working over in my mind how I can judge things in the world to be somehow not good — i.e. not to my liking — and how I can worry that what I put into the world may be judged not good — i.e. not to someone else's liking. But not everyone will like everything — there's simply not enough time to get to everything (as we've discussed before), let alone to have an opinion on everything, whether positive or negative.
I find that as I tread closer to what I think and feel I should be creating, I am less worried about what others may think of it, since I am going to do it anyway. I was intrigued to see a tweet from Jia Tolentino earlier this month about a review of her book in the London Review of Books: I've been idly waiting since my book came out for a truly scathing review of my bullshit, which seemed inevitable given the rest of my good luck & also like it could be useful. It finally came: a cleansing, illuminating experience to be read with such open disgust! I eagerly awaited my copy of the London Review of Books (a subscription to which I treated myself upon my move to freelancing) and savored the review. As stated above: not everyone will like everything, and both good reviews and bad reviews can be right, and it is all okay. It's still worth the thing existing, whatever the thing may be.
I am going to work on thinking of what I may have formerly labeled not good as instead not done. If I've written something or made something that I don't think is good, that just means it is not yet done in some way. Writing that wants more time and fleshing out, writing that hasn't fully become itself. If I am honest with myself about my work, and bring it through some process, on the other side of which I deem the thing done, then that means it is time to release the thing, and it is no longer precisely mine to worry about.
Along these lines — thinking again on your letter of last week, you noted in regards to your reading about visual perception and drawing, One particular bit I read recently was describing the ways in which our brains become impenetrable over time, as the rules we have for understanding the world become entrenched. I reflected on this on Saturday, after taking a bowl-turning class at the Women's Woodshop, using a lathe for the first time, working with wet, green box elder blanks that threw curls of fresh-smelling wood into the air and onto our hands and clothes as our tools pressed into the surfaces of our spinning cylinders. Jess Hirsch, teaching the class, described the process as unwrapping a tree into an object, a captivating idea. After the four-and-a-half hour class, I was tired; my brain had been worked in ways it didn't usually have to work. In a way, I felt fresh afterward even though I was tired; I imagined I had been through a brain workout, like when you exercise in some way that taps a muscle you didn't realize you had, and leaves that muscle worn but present, newly visible. I imagined my mind stretched like an animal skin, its edges pulled in multiple directions. The experience of turning a bowl on the lathe was filled with nuances — how to hold the tools in my hands and against my body, how to press the tools to the spinning wood block at just the right angle and with just the right relationship to the horizon line of the lathe's center core to smoothly remove wood layer by layer, unwrapping an object.
I'm on my way now to Michigan to attend the funeral of one of my dear friends of many years, Jason Polan, and I've been thinking about all that he left behind. He never hesitated to do exactly what he was good at and what he wanted to do — he led with that, and let the practicalities fall into line behind. He didn't labor over what to make — he simply made everything, reached out to everyone whose work he liked to trade art or do a project together. He never stopped. I've been mourning him and thinking about him this week after hearing of his death on Monday morning; I've cried alone and with M and with each of my parents on the phone and with you on the phone. I will cry more in these next few days. But at the same time I am truly in awe of how much Jason accomplished in what was a too-short life. Everything snaps into a cumulative kind of view when someone dies; their work, from their own hand, is complete. Yet I have the feeling that Jason's death may have snapped a lot of people into a realization of just how much is possible in a lifetime if you give it everything you have, and in that way, he's still making work, leaving his marks everywhere. Like the cover of the Seneca book that I haven't yet read says: Life is long if you know how to use it. Even after knowing Jason all these years — we met in the year 2000 as freshmen students at the University of Michigan — it stuns me to think about all the people whose life he has touched, all the artwork he has made, people he has connected directly, and people he has connected indirectly, through himself. I cannot get over how he truly did what he wanted to be doing, at all times, doing it well, doing it rigorously — making that his business.
Thank you for our conversation this week, and for being there with me in my sadness. I’ll (un)wrap here for now, and will look forward to the comfort of reading your letter later this week.
Much love,
Eva
January 30, 2020
Dear Eva,
This week you are sitting with a death, and I know this has probably changed “even the color of trees” as Gail Caldwell writes in her beautiful memoir about friendship and grief. Sitting with a death means starting to acknowledge and understand a staggering absence, recalibrating our entire way of being in this world with a piece of ourselves lost. But sitting with a death also means being flooded with and soaking in all that remains of someone after they are gone—memories, artifacts, ideas, connections. I am hopeful that this week you have been able to sit with all of it surrounded by others who loved Jason.
I did not know Jason, but the more I read about him, the more I wish I had. Talking to you on Tuesday I could feel his loss, which I suppose is just another way of saying I could feel your pain and it filled me with emotion. I am so happy for you that you had such a friend, and so sorry that you now have to experience this profound loss.
When we spoke, you mentioned the abundance of pieces of himself he left behind and how lucky you felt to have them now. This must be one of the greatest gifts of a creative life—the expression of a self put into fixed and lasting form in a million tiny different ways. I suppose any life leaves a trail of breadcrumbs when it ends—emails sent, handwritten notes on a desk, a hairbrush full of strands. But there is something different about creative work. It is the manifestation of an attempt made by someone to put something intangible—an idea, an essence, a mood—into tangible form, to capture that which cannot be captured. I can imagine no better way to remember someone I love.
For me, this notion of an artistic legacy tugs at the way we measure a life. There are so many ways to be human, to “give this life a go” as you once wrote. Sometimes I can scare myself when I think about how easily a life can dissolve when viewed after the fact. If you don’t have artifacts of their creative work or documentation of stories they told or quantifiable ways to measure impact like number of bodies they healed or children they taught, does the memory of that human life just slip right through your fingers? And what does that tell us about how we should live? Maybe not a whole lot, maybe the question of what can be preserved after death is distinct from the question of what has value in a life. As I write that sentence, I am sure that is true. And in any case, the premise of my fear is flawed—I know very well that the uncapturable is lasting, even if you do not have evidence to demonstrate it, even if you cannot express it in anything close to sufficient form. In my recent foray into drawing instruction, I have learned (or maybe been reminded) how much our brains know and understand that we may not and sometimes cannot put into the sort of logical and concrete thoughts we tend to think of as the only way of thinking. This harkens back to a previous conversation we had about my dad’s frustration with poetry, how he wished poets would just say what they mean in clear ways that he could understand.
There are things we know and feel for which straightforward language is deficient, for which even conscious thought cannot fully do justice. As you sit with death this week, I imagine you are experiencing this as you remember Jason and honor and relish all that he gave you and will continue to give you until your own story ends. Please know that I am sending all of love, for which there are no adequate words.
Yours,
Sarah